Albert Speer is the great Enigma of Nazi Germany. Before he was thirty he had become Hitler's architect. Soon he was building the new Reich's Chancellory and had transformed the Nuremberg rallies with his cathedrals of light' and gift for stage management. In 1942 Hitler appointed him his Armaments Minister and Speer quadrupled German arms production, keeping the German Army in the field and prolonging the war. Joachim Fest examines all the phases of Speer's life and work. Precisely because of Speer's contradictions, Fest sees him as representative of the mood and susceptibilities of the German people of the time. In this brilliant and persuasive book Fest argues that Albert Speer's life helps to explain how Germany broke with its traditions in 1933 and descended so far into crime and barbarism. This book is a crowning achievement for the writer who pioneered a new school of biographical writing in the 1960s with his Face of the Third Reich and his masterly Hitler biography, which has become a classic.